Published 4:06 pm, Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The video highlights the building’s retail space with images of shops, outdoor restaurants and a simulated world of people enjoying their surroundings. Pictures of a luxury hotel room and a spa represent a hotel that will fill a portion of the tower, which will also include high-end condominiums. Office space will comprise the top 28 floors. The video shows a “sky bar” atop the building with sweeping views of the city.

This city, however, is not Houston. It’s Midland.

The tower is being proposed for a two-block site in downtown Midland — the West Texas town that’s part of the booming Permian Basin. The video was shown at an event promoting the building Wednesday at the Houston Country Club.

“This is going to be the coolest thing west of Houston,” said J. Patrick Duffy, president of the Houston office of Colliers, the firm leasing space in the proposed building.

The project is called Energy Tower at City Center. The architect, who also spoke at the event, said the building would be “the spark to stimulate future growth of the city.”

To be sure, the proposal is more on par with something a developer would pitch for Houston.

Nothing in Midland comes close to the size and luxury the Energy Tower developers are pitching.

Most of the buildings in Midland were developed decades ago, and the tallest one is about 25 stories.

Construction is not likely to start until some leases are signed. Duffy said promising prospects include a high-end steakhouse for the retail space. The $400 million building, he said, could break ground next January and open by the first quarter of 2017.

“It’s a very real project,” Duffy said.

Bill Gilmer, director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston’s C.T. Bauer College of Business, questions if there’s enough demand to fill such a large building given the amount of consolidation that’s occurred in the energy industry, bringing many of the white-collar jobs to Houston.

He also said the project is reminiscent of the early 1980s oil boom, when Midland had a Rolls Royce dealership and a large fleet of private planes were parked at the airport.

“This kind of smacks of the same kind of excesses we’ve seen before,” Gilmer said.

The building is expected to attract major players in exploration and production as well as engineering firms, Duffy said. There will also be demand from ancillary industries like law and accounting.

The building would be developed on city-owned land. The project would include convention space and a public park, both of which would be owned by the city.

The developer is Energy Related Properties, which already owns about 1 million square feet of office space in Midland. Wexford Capital is a partner in the deal.

Economist Ray Perryman, of Odessa, talked at the promotional event about Midland’s connection to Houston.

Every time an oilfield job is created in Midland, he said, two are created in Houston.

The Midland economy is roaring, he explained, and there’s a shortage of office, retail and hotel space. Housing is also stretched thin.

The area is in the Permian Basin, an oil and gas producing region that stretches from south of Lubbock across West Texas into southeastern New Mexico. The area has been making a comeback after being briefly overshadowed by natural gas plays around Fort Worth and in East Texas.

The region’s Cline and Wolfcamp shales are drawing many of the industry’s biggest players.

Chevron is building a $100 million office campus in Midland and currently has about 550 employees there. The company plans to increase that to about 800 employees over the next few years.

Those involved in Energy Tower say it will have a significant impact on the city.

“This project will change the life of Midlanders, end users and visitors to the city,” said architect Michael Edmonds, founder and president of Edmonds International.

The project is slated for a site two blocks from Interstate 20 at West Texas Avenue and North Colorado Street.